Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

if you are frustrated that you as a voter have to choose between expressing your individual preferences and maximizing your utility, your issue is with first-past-the-post elections, not the Democratic Party

But we didn't have economic stagnation for the working class. We had a period of unusually *high* wage growth for low income workers.

the parties need to get together to push the button that gives me cheap health insurance and medical care without raising anyone's taxes

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Incredible.

“We noticed some anger from doctors last week. That’s why we invited RFK Jr. to talk about vaccines”

I like how "The West" in this article is just the United States. Even poor European countries like Portugal and Poland have high-speed trains!

"After two decades of legal wrangling and planning bottlenecks..." 😵😵😵

I detest the proclivity of certain public intellectuals to viciously lie about the economics profession with reckless disregard for the truth. Let's compare and contrast Cory Doctorow's recent calumnies on the Ezra Klein Show with some actual economics pedagogy.

Google earth has recently updated the 3D images for Bologna and now you can see the tram <3 So cool.

This is a problem:

Hard to think of a more stark illustration of the thesis from Sides and Tesler that Americans are increasingly polarized by their opinions on racial issues--yet not so neatly sorted into opinion blocks according to their own race.

I've been recently reading some seminal works in a sub-field of "law and economics" that I am hoping to contribute to. All the papers I've read so far predate the credibility revolution and it shows. Empirical evidence = anecdotes, theory = just some guy's conjecture. It was the Stone Age!

At the heart of every well used US transit system is a piece of infrastructure that was built over 100 years ago that you simply could not build today under any circumstances.

This is good. Two former Fed Chairs. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeIA... #FederalReserve

PoV: I am playing Civ and have once again forgotten to uppgrade one of my early game ships.

America has a housing shortage. Every single housing proposal you see that is not "build more housing" will have the primary effect of pushing up the prices of existing housing, and is therefore, in reality, a plan to enrich current homeowners. In conclusion, build more housing.

The Hmong are here because they fought for the US in a war we lost.

“I did not realize explaining things is not endorsement” is really aspirationally in the past tense for this website. It’s far and away the biggest problem with getting interesting intellectuals to actually stick around here.

I believe aliens visited New York City in 1900 to build the subway. Proof: a subway was built in New York and New Yorkers have not really been able to build one in the last 85 years.

Yes, and the Roman Senate continued to exist well after 476!

Each Friday, we’re sharing highlights from our Top of the Charts, a look back at our most popular charts, articles, and more in 2025. Today we give you our top 5 most-popular social media posts. 🧵 1. Does the news reflect what we die from? (Instagram) → www.instagram.com/p/DQY7zhcAgoW

In nuclear safety, we spend too much time chasing statistical ghosts—deploying studies that cannot resolve risk instead of governing the risks that actually matter. Today, @thebulletin.org published my article with PJ Seel on this exact problem.

There will be so many cars that none of them will be able to move

One of my more controversial opinions is that the US needs to significantly raise taxes to the tune of a couple % of GDP right now, even before any expansive social democratic reforms, and that means you—yes you, dear highly educated professional—will need to pay up, not just nebulous billionaires.

My humble suggestion: give it back to Ukraine, along with the rest of their country.

On the theme of, "American planners regulate the wrong things," we should have much stricter regulations on noise-proofing apartments. It's the sort of issue regulation is meant to handle: it's difficult for most consumer to assess it before making a decision, and it really impacts qualify of life.

ICE’s acting director ordered a Boston Catholic parish to tear down its Advent Nativity scene—stripped of baby Jesus and branded with the message “ICE WAS HERE.” The parish priest is refusing, citing he pope’s call to stand with migrants. It's another chapter in Kristi Noem's war on Christians.

babe wake up, new episode of Hard Drugs just dropped

[sits up in bed] The Sun is sincerely non-rival and non-excludable. The Sun is a public good.

I think this is mostly San Francisco finally shrugging off the pandemic, but it is *really* funny that rent prices in San Francisco shot up *immediately* after the city banned RealPage and other algorithmic price setting software. My pre trends are incredible!

Rent control and legislative term limits are two issues where the literature and the experts are very clear, and people just don't want to believe that they actually make the problem they care about worse.

lmfao Dude has an MD? I have to sort of admire the willingness to look stupid on purpose. I don't have that dog in me.

Saw the Zohran campaign sign generator on Instagram and had to get this out of my head. Ok goodbye again.

Shout out to the approximately 2.5 million supporters of Sierra Club who have walked away in the last five years. Praying another 1.5 million people join you. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

...Ceterum censeo filibustrem esse delendum.

It represents a culmination of an enormous amount of politicking for the NYT editorial board to simply state this as fact

Odd to frame the reconquest of lost Roman territory as "invasion of his own country," but I will concede that Pitchbot headlines as a genre often require shoehorning an analogy, and the shoehorning itself is sometimes the joke.

I feel like HousingSky doesn’t talk anywhere near enough about what Fritz Kaegi has done in Chicago area as Cook County Assessor.

Of all the housing charts not made by MMI, this one is my favourite. It shows how, despite rhetoric, housing shortages aren't a global phenomenon, but they do seem to be an Anglo-American one.

🚨NEW RESULTS (w/ Slattery & Nober) - When gov't engineers retire, highway projects cost more: the engineers pay for themselves 6 times over - Improving gov’t engineer quality from the 25th to 75th percentile reduces costs by 14%, equal to 3x avg. engineer pay Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Do you know who gets to knock down and renovate their palaces without asking for permission? Yup, kings

As an American, all I want is unlimited social programs, no taxes and no deficits. I want everyone to love my people and I don't want to deal with those people. I want sky high wages. I want the price of my assets to increase, but also everything should be cheap.

California, this November 4th, the whole country is counting on you. Prop 50 puts our elections back on a level playing field, preserves independent redistricting over the long term, and lets the people decide. So return your ballot today. Vote yes on 50.

once again asking simple question "does america have a free market in housing"

"Taxing the 1% more than the USA does" is not how Europe pays for its social welfare state. wid.world/document/why...

Posted a short blog post with updated data (and public repo with data) of current state of Econ job market: paulgp.com/2025/10/08/j...

We have got to do something about electricity rates in California.